Marmalade enjoys surge in BlackBerry 10 developers

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Development community for mobile SDK embraces mobile manufacturer's latest smartphone

Marmalade has reported a surge in users of its mobile SDK on the newly launched BlackBerry 10 platform.

The middleware maker has seen an increase in developers choosing to use its SDK on BlackBerry 10 from under three per cent in August 2012 to 24 per cent in January 2013 – that’s second only to iOS and ahead of Android. Not all of those developments are necessarily submitted to the BlackBerry app store, but it is an indicator of the support developers are showing the platform.

Marmalade COO Harvey Elliot told Develop he believed a rise in Blackberry support was down to the company’s efforts in encouraging developers to port existing mobile titles to the Blackberry 10 through port-a-thon events, webinars and developer road shows.

“We have issued thousands of Marmalade licences into the BlackBerry community along with target devices, to help bring content to this new market. Their technology teams have been open and approachable, and keen to help solve the issues developers may find when tackling a new platform,” said Elliot.

“They clearly care about enabling the development community to get to grips with their device and have tried to make it as easy as possible to bring games and apps from other platforms into the BlackBerry ecosystem.”

BlackBerry isn’t known for being a prominent player in the games space, but Elliot believes the company is now in a position to change that.

“All the pieces are in place for BlackBerry to lay claim to a strong gaming offering. With the native support within the Marmalade SDK, games from Android, iOS and other platforms can be rapidly deployed onto BlackBerry World – which means that gamers can find a lot of great content available on that device,” he added.

“For me it’s that cross-device portability that is key – developers may not choose to build a bespoke BlackBerry game in the early months of release, but through Marmalade there is an easy way to bring existing games to the new technology that helps them take advantage of being amongst the first to market.

“Games developers are seeing the opportunity in a fresh marketplace, and in this early stage I think we’ll see one or two interesting sleeper hits coming out of BlackBerry World that might have had a harder time on one of the more established marketplaces.”